Have staff been keen to come back to work? Funnily enough, we’ve employed chefs that have been shari27 May 2020 12:09
Have staff been keen to come back to work?
Funnily enough, we’ve employed chefs that have been sharing flats together for the last three or four weeks. They come to work together and they go home and live together, self-isolating in flat share arrangements.
We’re opening for six hours in the evening, with seven shifts a week, so we employ two chefs for 42 hours a week. We started off like that because we didn’t want a whole rotating workforce potentially bringing in possible infections.
We’ll see how it goes in the next few weeks. We’re looking at our labour pools to see whether we can say to people, it would be really helpful if you shared accommodation and came to work, to create a pod or a pool of people who’re self-isolating together.
We are all keen to get the trade going again. We want to have enough trade to employ the people, what we don’t want is to end this period of furloughing and have to start getting into redundancies.
This is one of the many reasons why we’re starting to get it going, so we’re ready in a couple of months’ time to reopen in some way.
Has your delivery experience helped?
Normal takeout/delivery is about 15%-20% of our business. So if we can go back to that level and maybe a bit more we’ll be doing maybe 30% or so.
The new locations were previously good delivery and takeout branches for us. They were also physically big enough that we could do the social distancing and there was lots of room for people to keep apart.
Who are you working with on delivery?
We’ve had had relationships with both Deliveroo and Uber Eats, but we’re doing Deliveroo at the moment for the trial. We’re still very friendly with Uber Eats and might open some more sites in a few weeks time and try it with them.
I think that old one-off relationship with delivery companies is over. A lot of places now have two or three tablets. Effectively the drivers work for all three companies anyway. They’re all freelance.
How do you see dine-in returning?
Slowly. The bigger restaurants will be easier as we have the space to spread out tables.
But the real issue as with all the other operators in the sector is rents. The landlords are obviously keen for us to reopen, but we won’t have the turnover to justify the rents we were paying before. We can do more delivery than before, but we’ll have half the turnover initially of dine in. And that will build slowly.
We’re talking to all our landlords now and explaining that the rent they were receiving before is not going to happen again.
I think nine months is probably too short for a time out, I think we’ve got to take a two or three year view.
Sign In
Follow the stocks
